Working Girls and the Temporality of Efficiency

TLDR: The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl, as Told by Herself (1905) as discussed by the authors highlights the ways in which time is disproportionately articulated to different subjects, the means employed to discipline the corporeal enactment of time, and the potential for subjects to resist this orthodoxy.

Abstract: The public circulation of temporal discourse fashions the way in which subjects experience and value their time. At the turn of the twentieth century, experts in systematic management mandated that wage-earning women must be prodded into efficient labor in order to increase the overall yield of industry. Against this regime of time, the narrator of The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl, as Told by Herself (1905) subverted the temporal protocols governing her by re-deploying efficient labor for her own agenda. Analysis of this work highlights the ways in which time is disproportionately articulated to different subjects, the means employed to discipline the corporeal enactment of time, and the potential for subjects to resist this orthodoxy.